Apache Camel security advisory

CVE-2026-85260

Camel-MLLP: protected health information disclosure - logPhi defaulted to true so HL7 payload content was written to the log out of the box, and two code paths logged it regardless of the setting

Description

The camel-mllp component carries a logPhi option that governs whether HL7 payload content may be written to the log. It defaulted to true, so a deployment that did nothing logged protected health information out of the box. Two further paths wrote payload content to the log regardless of the setting, so even an operator who had turned logPhi off was still exposed on those paths. MLLP is used to carry HL7 clinical messages, so the content concerned is patient data, and it reached ordinary application logs where it is subject to whatever retention, aggregation and access the deployment applies to logs generally rather than to clinical records.

Mitigation

Upgrade to Apache Camel 4.23.0, which fixes the issue. Users on the 4.18.x LTS releases stream should upgrade to 4.18.5. Users on the 4.22.x LTS releases stream should upgrade to 4.22.1. logPhi now defaults to false and is honoured on the paths that previously ignored it. This is a changed default: a deployment that relied on payload logging must now set logPhi=true explicitly. Because the upgrade guide for a change like this lives on the main branch only, operators upgrading within the 4.18.x or 4.22.x lines should treat this advisory as the notice of that change. For deployments that cannot upgrade immediately, set logPhi=false and be aware that two paths will continue to log payload content until the fix is applied; restrict access to the logs accordingly.

Credit

This issue was discovered by Claude Security Scan Tool

Notes

The JIRA ticket: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CAMEL-24454 refers to the various commits that resolved the issue, and has more details.

The fix was merged on main in https://github.com/apache/camel/pull/25832 (commit dd2bf57190c12ff7f1e97f121738867a680992ce), backported to camel-4.22.x in https://github.com/apache/camel/pull/25944 (commit 95b4c1500001bc32877df5b8fca0bc7bdd080666) and to camel-4.18.x in https://github.com/apache/camel/pull/25946 (commit 4ec9b37d70b08c478966000fb1bd653abfe410e3).

The issue is classified as CWE-532 Insertion of Sensitive Information into Log File. The camel-4.14.x line reached end of life before this fix and does not receive it; deployments on 4.14.x should move to 4.18.5 or later.

References

CVE-2026-85260.txt.asc — PGP signed advisory data cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-85260